Prison oversight's money pit

Thursday

Feb 14, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Gov. Jerry Brown is mad as hell and he doesn't want to spend it any more.

Gov. Jerry Brown is mad as hell and he doesn't want to spend it any more.

For the past 15 years the state has shelled out about $12 million a year to pay private law firms representing inmates and the judges' own hand-picked authorities benefiting financially by keeping the cases alive.

An Associated Press analysis of the costs found payments totaling $182 million covering a dozen lawsuits filed over the treatment of state prisoners, parolees and incarcerated juveniles, some of which have been settled. The total exceeds $200 million when the state's own legal costs are added.

It's all one giant conflict of interest, in Brown's view, because there is no incentive to be done with it and let the state start running its prisons again.

To cite but one example, J. Clark Kelso, the court-appointed receiver who controls California's prison health care system, is paid $224,000 annually, and his administration costs taxpayers about $2 million a year. The receivership has spent $2.4 million for lawyers.

Kelso has argued in federal court against the judge's relinquishing prison oversight.

"There is no effort on our part to delay any part of this case," a spokeswoman for Kelso said.

The receiver wants to return control to the state as soon as it proves it can properly care for inmates, she added.

Brown wants court oversight - and Kelso's job - ended. The fixes have been made and the money can be spent better on inmate education, substance abuse treatment and other rehabilitation programs, as well as to supervise convicts once they leave prison.

And it's not like the state hasn't spent hundreds of millions - beyond the $200 million for inmate lawyers and defending itself against those lawyers - to improve conditions at the state's 33 prisons. A prime example is the huge, $900 million prison hospital being built in Stockton.

Nobody denies our prisons were a mess. Or that they weren't horribly overcrowded. Or that inmate health care wasn't unconscionable.

But overcrowding has been reduced and health care improved. At some point you have to ask, "How much is enough?"

Brown argues, and not without reason, we've reached that point. His latest complaint is part of his broad-based attack on continued federal court oversight. Part of that effort was his hiring Jeffrey Beard, former head of the Pennsylvania prison system and an expert witness who once criticized the California lock-ups, to run this state's prisons.

"Things have changed," Beard now says of conditions here.

What Brown wants changed is the millions the state has been spending for attorneys and on outsiders who have pushed those changes and gotten the federal court to require them.